


No Sin in Shadow or in Light

by vanilla_villain37 (van1lla_v1lla1n)



Series: pinch hits (reylo one-shots) [5]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Annihilation (2018), Blood, Body Horror, Dream Sex, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Hallucinations, Hallucinogens, Monsters, No Pregnancy, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/van1lla_v1lla1n/pseuds/vanilla_villain37
Summary: A malignant anomaly has overtaken the coastal village of Coruscant, and the First Order has recruited Rey as part of its ninth scientific expedition into the area, now known as the Unknown Region. The members of previous expeditions who did survive reported hallucinations, a warped sense of time, monsters when they returned. But Rey is plagued by visions of a dark-haired man, and haunted by the notion that the First Order's role in all this is not quite what the organization claims.---AnAnnihilationAU for the Reylo Readers & Writers "Let's Go to the Movies" exchange.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: pinch hits (reylo one-shots) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1859386
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23
Collections: Let's Go to the Movies - Reylo Readers & Writers Prompt Exchange, Reylo Hidden Gems





	No Sin in Shadow or in Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/gifts).



> Please see endnotes for CWs.

* * *

_There is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive._

Rey’s sleeping bag was sticky in the humid heat; it clung to her skin when she rolled over in the tent. Bright light filtered through the green nylon. Outside, she heard voices and stumbled out of the tent to find them. The other two women were standing a few yards away, sorting through packs lying on the ground.

Rose looked up, nodded at her. “Do you remember setting up camp? Because neither of us do.”

Rey shook her head. “Do you know how long we’ve been here?”

“A few days, maybe, judging by the food we’ve got left,” Jannah said. “We should get moving either way.” None of their tech seemed to be functioning, and Jannah pulled a map from a pocket on the side of her pack while Rose helped Rey break down her tent. Packing up their remaining rations, they set out through the humid woods for the Origin.

The three of them formed the ninth expedition sent by the First Order to collect samples in the Unknown Region, a malignant scientific anomaly that had overtaken the coastal village of Coruscant. Rose Tico was an evolutionary biologist and Jannah Bir a botanist; Rey had been a paramedic, recruited to accompany them and protect them from the feral creatures known to inhabit the Unknown Region.

The majority of the previous eight expeditions had not returned, and the few members who did came alone, scarred by a warped sense of time and by memories of mutated reptiles and cancerous fungi killing their compatriots. The returnees would never return to civilian life, and so the First Order was extremely selective in its recruitment for expedition members.

Warned of these dangers by their First Order handler, the ninth expedition was tasked with gathering as many samples as they could of the mutated flora and fauna within the region and returning them to the First Order at all cost. If possible, they were to travel to the Origin, a hut on the coastal island of Ahch-To where the malignancy of the Unknown Region was presumed to have originated a few years before.

Rey took a sip of water while Rose and Jannah stopped to slip slices of neon flower petals and to dust rotten-smelling pollen into vials. Rey had studied the animals indigenous to the area when she accepted the recruitment offer, but so far she’d seen none of them.

The plants were very obviously not normal, though, even to Rey, who’d never even kept a “foolproof” houseplant alive. Here, vines strangled the trees, sprouting off leaves in all shapes, and low shrubs spewed flowers both tiny and massive in bright clashing colors, some with thorns as big as a thumb thrusting from the center like stamen.

Rose’s and Jannah’s heads were pressed close over some particularly enigmatic plant. Their low murmurs grew increasingly difficult to hear over a curious ringing rumble, until Rey couldn’t hear them at all—and then she blinked, and she was somewhere else. Somewhere silent.

She stood in a cramped room, a man in front of her crouched over a too-low worktable, his ragged clothing a faded black, his dark hair long and scraggly. His shoulders were broad but hunched; Rey suspected that if he stood to full height his head would bump the low ceiling. She peered around him to see his work, but the table, and whatever was on it, were blurry. She could make nothing out apart from the man and the general state of the room.

She heard a low murmur: “Grandfather, I will finish what you started.”

She leaned to the side to peer around him, and the man flinched at the creak in the floorboards. But just as he began to turn, Rey’s ears roared, and she tumbled back into the damp woods of the Unknown Region. She wasn’t certain her body had moved at all—Rose and Jannah didn’t seem to have even looked up from their plant—but in the sudden shock of complete environmental change Rey lost her balance and stumbled to her knees.

She stood up hurriedly, dizzy under the weight of her pack, and took an overly generous drink from her day’s water ration. Maybe they’d trekked through some hallucinogenic plant; maybe she was tired; maybe waking dreams were just another horror of this place, to go with the monsters and the chronological warp.

* * *

Rey was hesitant about the canoe they found by the swamp, but it was their only option to avoid doubling back for—hours? days? They didn’t know how long it had been, but it was too long to realistically consider. On its side in peeling paint, filled in with magenta moss, was an insignia like a rounded crown with an angular fleur at the center and the optimistic name _The Falcon_. The canoe wobbled in the water but didn’t have any noticeable leaks. Jannah estimated they’d only need it for a few miles, and Rey paddled hard from the front to get them there as fast as she could while Rose steered from the back per Jannah’s navigation.

They heard the small splashes of fish in the water but never looked in time to make out the bodies. Once Rey nearly lost her paddle when Rose gasped behind her; a translucent snakelike creature swam close enough on the surface of the water that Rey could make out its spine and teeth through its skin.

Within sight of shore Rey heard a rush of water behind them, and Rose’s voice wavered when she asked Jannah to look. Jannah’s response was distressingly calm: “Paddle. Now.” So Rey paddled—she didn’t turn to look as the rushing water grew louder, didn’t turn to look when a multiphonic screech barraged their ears, didn’t turn to look when something jarred the canoe.

She jumped out too soon, into water up to her thighs, and the weight of the swamp was like quicksand around her legs. She thrashed frantically in the water, tugging the canoe behind her, not looking and not looking at whatever was in the water. Jannah threw their packs to shore, and as the boat rocked, Rey finally turned to take Rose’s hand to help her out.

Rey froze in a white alligator’s glare, the creature’s maw opened wide to reveal rows and rows of opalescent teeth. Its jaw snapped, close enough to splash water onto Rey’s face, and at a tug on her arm Rey turned, picked up a pack, and bolted toward a tall structure in the meadow behind them. A watchtower. She heard thrashing, creaking, cracking behind her—the monster destroying _The Falcon_. Rey hoped it would be a long enough distraction for them to make it to the building.

They darted up the steps as fast as they could in their drenched clothes and under the weight of their packs. By the time they turned to look out the door of the watchtower down toward the swamp, nothing but flotsam and clouds of bubbles bobbed in the water.

In the watchtower they found sleeping bags and packs, but whoever had owned them had been gone for some time. With all that pushed to the side, there was just enough space for them to set out their own bedrolls and for Jannah and Rose to set up a temporary lab station to run tests on some of their samples.

Rey sat at the tiny table in the corner while they muttered about cell structure, wondering if it had been that white alligator or something else that kept the previous folks from coming back for their belongings. She traced a finger along the grooves in the wooden table, paused to pry a splinter from her fingertip, and when she looked back down noticed a shape carved into the tabletop—crude, but reminiscent of that rounded crown she’d seen painted onto the canoe. She’d never seen anything else like it. Perhaps some local emblem from the time before the Unknown Region had taken over.

After they’d eaten their bland dinner portions, Rey asked, “How did the Unknown Region form anyway? The psychiatrist would never say.”

“Phasma? No, she wouldn’t,” Jannah said. “I’m not sure they know, really, but I heard it was some experiment gone wrong, a few years back—some old dude fucking around with DNA and the mutations got out of hand.”

“At the Origin?” Rey asked.

“Yeah, it’s supposed to’ve been his lab.”

“What was he _trying_ to do?”

“I guess his wife died of cancer or something. Somebody told me he was fiddling with the Hayflick limit.”

“But the Hayflick limit doesn’t affect cancer cells anyway,” Rose said.

Jannah shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the rumor.”

* * *

Rey dreamed of Rose and Jannah standing ahead of her in a dark forest, their backs turned. They faced her, and they were a man—taller, with broader shoulders, hair in soft waves around a featureless face. The man from her hallucination. He beckoned to her to follow him, and then he turned and disappeared into the ground.

Rey hurried to where the man had been standing, and found a stairwell leading down into the dirt. She hesitated at the unlit opening, then descended, blinked, and was standing in that cramped room she’d been thrown into hours or days or weeks before, just after they arrived. She could make out a bit of the worktable now, vials of blood, a centrifuge, other small medical-looking machines.

Something shifted in the corner, and she started when she saw the man standing there, facing her. He was shirtless, his arm bandaged around the elbow. His face had features now, a prominent nose and high forehead, dark eyes that studied her.

“ _You_ ,” Rey said. “You caused all this, didn’t you?”

He raised an eyebrow, asked, “Who are you?”

Rey shook her head. “You’re a monster.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am. But I’m not sure I’m the one you think I am.”

His mouth moved again, but a deep roaring drowned out the words, and Rey jolted awake in the watchtower.

* * *

Rose and Jannah turned back to return the samples they’d collected to the First Order, deciding the risk of not making it back was too great to justify continuing on to the Origin. They had no idea how long they'd been out, couldn't keep track of when or what they'd eaten, and they were worried they'd starve themselves to death or end up mauled by some other mutated creature before they could return.

“I know you didn’t want to see the blood samples,” Rose had told her, “but they’re not good. Something’s infecting us.” 

So Rey went on alone, telling Rose and Jannah to take the long way around the swamp and its monsters. They’d tried to convince her to come with them, but she just shook her head. She had nothing to go back for—she knew it and the First Order must’ve known it too. Why else had they recruited her?

There was so much Rey would never know about herself, and she wanted so deeply to _know_ something, to understand something no one else could. And she couldn’t deny her curiosity about the man in her hallucinations, her dreams—was he real? What had he meant, that he wasn’t the monster she thought he was?

Rey was fine alone, had lived alone from the day she left her foster home at seventeen, but she missed Rose and Jannah after they left, amid the feral howls she heard on the nights she could remember. Other nights she dreamed too deeply—of life before, of bright twisting halls full of plants that spoke and screamed and sang—to notice what was happening outside. With others there she hadn’t fixated on all that so much, more worried about protecting the others than herself.

She dreamed she was home, in her own bed, the dark-haired man’s hands in her hair, his mouth hot at her neck as he rocked into her. He looked up into her face, his eyebrows slanted and sweet, while he came, and he bit her lip so hard it bled. He slipped down her body—and then she was awake, in a stuffy tent, surrounded by her pack and her shitty military rations and bizarre plants that would probably turn her into one of them if she died among them.

She dreamed while she hiked. A pastel-flowered vine hanging from a tree reached for her throat as she passed. Tiny snakes swirled around her arms, under her skin, their fangs biting up through her palms. She stumbled through a putrid meadow, a decomposing bear huffing at her heels, its sudden rattling roar a wave that knocked her to her knees. But when she rolled to her back, the bear was gone.

* * *

There was a cottage in the distance, the flowers outside it neatly kept but strange, the petals growing out in mirrored geometric shapes. The paint on the walls was patchy, perfect in some places and peeling rainbows in others. The windows were open. She knocked, not quite certain what she expected; of course there was no answer.

The door swung easy on its hinges when she pressed it open. Inside it was like someone had left for work and never come back, neat but lived in. She didn’t dare open the fridge, but everything in the pantry had turned to colorful drifts of dust. A blue clock on the wall, and on the table a standard First Order expedition journal, with an insignia she recognized—that rounded crown—scribbled into the cover in ballpoint. She tucked it into her pack.

A shadow crossed the window, and Rey hurried to the door, peering out. The man from her dream. Running after him, she snatched up a stick, but as she wailed on him with it neon petals drifted to the ground. She blinked, and the man was only a tall shrub. Vaguely human shaped, yes, but just a plant.

Dazed, she leaned up toward its face, pressed her mouth to one of the wide flowers there. Her eyes closed, she felt the soft skin of the petals against her lips, breathed in the scent of pollen, then startled back when a thorn pricked her finger.

She stumbled back into the house, sat down at the table, her head in her hands. After a moment she pulled out the journal. The first pages were a standard log, but after that things started to spiral—the neat handwriting got sloppier, made less sense. The entries were dated; she checked her own journal to recall what year she’d been in before the expedition.

The First Order had claimed that only a few years had passed since the Unknown Region’s malignancy had begun to spread, but this journal’s entries were dated to nearly a decade ago.

_My father did this, created this, and I will never be able to correct it. Hiding here is my penance, my punishment for failing to save Ben from the same fate—to prevent him from becoming Kylo Ren. I have failed him, failed my father, failed my sister, failed Coruscant. This evil will spread._

_A Resistance is growing to counter the First Order’s exploitation of the Unknown Region, but I fear I am too far gone to help. The malignancy overtakes me already; I feel its refractions in my blood._

_You must get to Ahch-To. He will be there. I could not save him, and that is my failure, but perhaps it will not be yours._

_The island. Get there. Take the footbridge off the beach, three miles north of the orchard, where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner. The son of the daughter of the man that made me, made this, will be there. And there he brings forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness._

_You must get there before you too are overtaken._

_I tried to tell him: There shall be a fire that knows the naming of you. . . . Its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains._

_But you must tell him what I could not: There is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive._

* * *

When Rey spotted the orchard’s neat, overgrown rows she began to run. Rotten fruit squished under her feet as she crossed between the trees, lemongrass fumes wafting up around her. She wasn’t certain of the last time she’d eaten, and her legs were shaky by the time she reached the footbridge on the beach.

She hesitated on the step up to the bridge. Across it the small island, Ahch-To, was close enough that she could just make out a path leading up from the rocky beach, switchbacking into sparse woods. There was a stone structure up a short incline; it seemed small, but its true size was impossible to tell from a distance.

The bridge swung under her feet, and she clung tight to one handline as she crossed. She tried to make out any sign of life on the island, but there was nothing—no people, smoke drifting up from the stone hut. Perhaps it was empty, its inhabitants long gone. The journal’s urgency had infected her, but its entries had been dated so long ago. Had the First Order lied about the Origin, or had the journal’s owner been confused by the Unknown Region’s chronological warp?

From the beach, Rey considered the path up and ditched her pack on a rocky outcrop she hoped would be out of reach of the tide. Her heart raced faster than it should’ve on the climb up to the stone hut; her hands shook on the final stretch. A few feet from the door she stood and listened, but she heard nothing. The thin metal door creaked as she pushed it open and stepped into the darkness.

The man from her visions was sitting on a low bench against the far wall, dressed in dark fraying clothes. His sleeves were pushed up, and the creases of his elbows were marked by glowing bruises, the veins extending up his biceps and down his forearms incandescent. He tilted his head as he looked up at her.

“So you are real,” he said.

“You’re Ben, aren’t you? I need you to come with me. We can stop all this. You can help me.”

“I’m not Ben anymore. Who are you?” He studied her. “You’re nothing. Nobody.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the only reason I made it here.”

“Why have you come?”

“The Unknown Region is spreading. We have to stop it. I found a journal—it said you knew what caused all this, how to stop it. Do you?”

He stood up slowly, stooping under the low ceiling, and shook his head, dismissive. “It’s too late for that.”

Rey stamped her foot lightly on the dirt floor. She knew next to nothing about this man, nothing that could convince him. She stepped closer to him and held out her hand.

“Please,” she said. “Come with me. It’s not too late. It can’t be." He just stared at her hand, his jaw working.

"Wait," she said. "The journal—it said to tell you, ‘There is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.'"

His gaze bored into her face, and with a breath he reached for her hand, his fingers quivering. His palm slid over hers, his fingers wrapping around her wrist—and Rey heard that ringing roar, and the room went white.

* * *

Rey was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, a warm hand in hers. She looked up at the man standing next to her, and he looked back at her, bewildered.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Rey.” She turned to face him. “Are you Ben?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his hand tightening on hers. “But I know what we have to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> CWs: hallucinations with possibility of exposure to a hallucinogenic plant; mentions of blood in a medical context; possibly hallucinated body horror; mentions of animal violence and possible starvation.
> 
> If you have any concerns about specifics, please feel free to DM me; I'm on Twitter at [@van1lla_v1lla1n](https://twitter.com/van1lla_v1lla1n).
> 
> Some of the weirder quotes in the journal Rey finds in the cottage are adapted from [the book _Annihilation_](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1509063-where-lies-the-strangling-fruit-that-came-from-the-hand)
> 
> Comments and kudos are like little hugs and I appreciate them so much 💕


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